Conference Agenda

Ensuring city livability and sustainability is one of the grand societal challenges of the twenty-first century. This study analyzes the longitudinal relationships between the three dimensions of urban sustainability and city livability, while exploring the moderating effect of business regulatory quality. We test those relationships in a sample of 66 European cities from 2007 to 2019. Overall, our findings confirm the positive effect of the three urban sustainability dimensions on city livability over time, although a stronger relationship between social urban sustainability and city livability is found. Furthermore, our results show that business regulatory quality reinforces the positive effect of economic and environmental urban sustainability on livability. Therefore, this study provides new insights on the interrelations between urban sustainability and city livability that can help improve life in cities.

Stakeholders receive diverse signals regarding a firm’s environmental practices, influencing their reactions and subsequently impacting the firm's market value. This study acknowledges these signals as either positive (stemming from the firm's environmental initiatives) or negative (emanating from environmental controversies highlighted by external sources). Our analysis not only scrutinizes the impact of these positive and negative signals on firm market value but also explores their specific characteristics, encompassing volume, persistence, and strength. Additionally, we investigate the interplay between environmental initiatives and controversies on firm market value. The results derived from examining a sample of 346 publicly listed firms spanning from 2006 to 2022 reveal the contrasting effects that positive and negative signals exert on a firm’s market value. Moreover, we find an interaction effect between these signals, which emphasizes the necessity of considering signal characteristics for a comprehensive understanding of their implications.

This study analyses how both internal and external factors influence the adoption and implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) contracting within the European countries. Through a comprehensive analysis of 5,824 firm-year observations across 18 European countries from 2013 to 2022, this research examines the impact of board characteristics and institutional pressures on the integration of CSR into executive compensation. Employing a multilevel regression analysis, our findings highlight the positive impact of board specific skills and independence on CSR contracting. Moreover, the empirical results show that the implementation of CSR contracting it is positively related to corruption control and inversely related to regulatory quality. Furthermore, the interplay between board characteristics and institutional pressures offers crucial insights for practitioners, policymakers, and regulators concerning corporate governance mechanisms and the country governance system in formulating CSR strategies.